Imagine a water slide on Clingman’s Dome, a Ferris wheel in Cades Cove or a road running to Andrews Bald.

I first typed those words back in 1991 when I was a reporter for The Knoxville Journal. The staff was collectively working on the paper’s yearly add-on, special edition, extra project. Our subject was the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which had the 50th anniversary of its dedication the previous year.

I tackled two stories for that special, one on the Foothills Parkway and the other on the attempt to get wilderness designation for the majority of the park’s 522,427 acres. My seemingly nonsensical lede sprung from my own incredulity while researching the story that, while unlikely, it was not impossible for such things to happen. Because the park didn’t have wilderness designation and doesn’t to this day.

We think of our National Parks as these inviolate entities that will never come to harm. Which is mostly true, unless you get enough numbskulls in charge with the power to make it otherwise. The one thing that would put that possibility further from reach would be wilderness designation, the strictest management for any federal land. The effort to get that status first began following passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964.

By the time of my story, our two senators, Al Gore Jr. and Jim Sasser, had sponsored a bill to get the designation. I interviewed Sasser, who said “you never know when you’re going to have an administration that’s more willing to develop our pristine, natural areas. This would be one step in ensuring that didn’t happen.” And that would mean no development or road construction other than the land set aside for the Foothills Parkway (a quick aside on the late Jim Sasser, I never called his office that he didn’t take my call or return it as soon as he was available).

The fly in the ointment, as usual, was a promise made to Swain County, North Carolina, during the park’s creation, short version is a road to access cemeteries now inside the park boundary that were further cut off by the Tennessee Valley Authority via Fontana Lake. The North Shore Road was a section of the planned Trans-Mountain Road that was to run from Townsend to Fontana but was scuttled due to environmental impact. The North Shore Road was started but never finished due to same, ending in a tunnel and known now as the Road to Nowhere. But then-Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC) wasn’t going to let it go. I tried to interview him, but he never returned my calls. Anyone who wants to take a ferry ride to the area can book it through the park service.

A Graham County, N.C. commissioner I interviewed, Ray Williams, said the road would also open up more of the N.C. side of the park to the type of development that benefitted Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg, which was only half then what it is now. Because 441 exits on the N.C. side of the park into the Eastern Cherokee reservation, there were desires to spread the immediate benefit beyond the Qualla Boundary.

Gore and Sasser sponsored a bill to pay Swain County $11.1 million to let go of the road and get the designation. That didn’t happen. Then-Sen. Terry Sanford (D-NC) sponsored a bill to pay Swain County $16 million without the designation, preferring a one stone, one bird at a time approach. Helms threatened a filibuster, so Sanford pulled the bill. Helms countered with a bill to get Swain County the $16 million and also get the road. Stubborn ole mule.

The environmental impact concerns went beyond runoff leaching into Fontana Lake, rivers and streams from road construction in this remote area of the park. I interviewed Peter Kirby, then the Southeast regional director of the Wilderness Society, who said the road would open up some of “the most secure black bear habitat to poaching.” Even by the early 1990s, the bear population in the Smokies was still in a state of recovery.

Poaching had been in the news back in 1991. Kirby was worried about a remote area of the park, but in January that year two jackasses from Florida, Travis Murrel Williams and Charles Lanie Norvel, were arrested for killing two trophy whitetail bucks in Cades Cove, one of the most visited areas of the park. They pulled it off by one dropping the other off in the evening who walked into the cove carrying a rifle with a silencer. Whichever one went in killed Streamer and Tim’s Ten, both of whom had been featured in outdoor magazines, cut their heads off and left with them. They served more time for the firearms charges than they did for the dead deer. If it can happen in Cades Cove, it can happen anywhere.

The park is part of the lifeblood of East Tennessee, especially Cocke, Sevier and Blount counties. The National Park Service is under pressure from the sledgehammer approach of the not-really-an-audit firing of federal employees in careless fashion. Allegedly 12 have been let go from the G.S.M.N.P. I could not (nor did I expect to) get confirmation of that or any number. We have the most visited National Park in the country, which is both a blessing and a curse. It is being loved to death, and it is all current staff can do to manage the bad behavior that goes on it: littering, illegal parking, bear jams in the cove, being idiots with wildlife (especially around elk and bears), releasing balloons from the Newfound Gap Overlook, vandalism, trashing overstressed bathrooms, etc. And let’s not forget the northeast end of the park from Big Creek to Cataloochee was trashed by the hurricane and closed indefinitely.

If you want the park to remain properly staffed and all areas open, call our representatives. The task of destruction is infinitely easier than that of creation. Film-maker Ken Burns said our National Parks are America’s best idea, if we can keep them.

Beth Kinnane writes a history feature for KnoxTNToday.com. It’s published each Tuesday and is one of our best-read features.

Sources: Author’s personal collection from The Knoxville Journal, National Park Service, Public Broadcasting Service